Dubstep is not in any way whatsoever, a logical progression/sub genre/related fracture within dub/reggae/dancehall — In contrast, d n b and junglist certainly were a worthy step forward within the genre a decade or more back.
Why is dubstep a cul de sac of conservatism and musical/cerebral sludge?Because dubstep is middle class student music, and as far as new ideas go, is utterly redundant. Heavy, gut wrenchingly loud bass does not make a genre original. Nor does volume or trendy basement sessions. This is a simple case of form over content.The emperors new clothes. Dubstep is dirge music for introspective middle class dope smokers and students, with none of the innovation of the prvieoulsy mentioned genres. Even the name shows it’s backwardness : “Dub”, which is by now, an utterly tired, exhausted genre too , after 30 years or more in the public arena, and “Step”,arguably an abbreviation of the most well worn, dullest, stodgiest, most dull witted,most unimaginative sub genre within reggae — “steppers” — itself, much loved by white middle class students.Steppers is defined by the utterly unimaginative “dum dum dum” of the ( often computer soulless ) bass drum, and heavymetal style lyrics about apocalypse and retribution and cod spirituality and doom and gloom — Lots of lyrical “wooh yeahs” and “ooowwwws” , just as Judas Priest and Sabbath went in for.See people like the new roots lot for examples of this.
No — the emperor really is wearing no clothes.
Dubstep? Don’t belive the hype for a moment. This is the worst , most banal digi steppers, meets ambient, meets very slight edges of junglist and that tired old genre trip hop which no one dare mention any more it was so goddamn awful.
No — reggae and its related genres have created NOTHING new and worthy in the last ten years or so, when Junglist and d n b hardened into cliche and formula. Digi dub, one drops steppers, hard step — all irredeemabley awful bollocks and horse manure of the highest order. They are no more than the new heavy metal they are so so unadventurous.
PS Re-reading the above it sounds arrogant and dismissive — not supposed to. Just feel tired of so many genres masquerading as offering the startlingly new when basically all they are doing is re-inventing the wheel. Some dubstep sounds alright, sure, –but really, so much of it sounds little different to what Sly and Robbie were doing with their Taxi discomixes 20 years ago….to prove my point, check out dubstep tunes like “Hotstepping”,”Killerstep”, and “dubstep dreams”…. Damn, even the titles are derivative…..c’mon guys, just say it, the emperor really has no clothes on….
LOL – no punches pulled there, Mr Eye… I’m fairly cynical about dubstep myself but do like some of the records and it does sound good over a big system.
At its worst it sounds like derivative digidub circa 95 (Scud/Prowling Lion etc) with slightly different beats. In some ways that is a better sound than some of the current UK stuff anyway, so it keeps me happy. Maybe “newness” is overrated anyway?
Newness for the sake of it can easily lead down path of being experimental without being any good… I’m pretty happy with a pile of old records myself. Not quite sure what you’re into – but thanks for dropping by mate!
Yes, I agree it sounds good live — there is always something deep, something primal, effecting and essentially moving about a b line at extreme volume anyway.
You say, maybe newness is over rated? Well yes, I see your point, and in part I agree. But perhaps posturing as the new — as Dubstep does ( In my view at least ) is even worse.
I don’t essentially even dislike Dubstep really — Skream/loefah /Skuba stuff aint bad — they are alright i s’pose.
On a minor point tho, why do so many grime/d n b/junglist/garage/dubstep artists always choose such silly names? I thought loofah was something I found in a bathroom. Lots of the other names, Psyko, Intenz,Twista,Avenga, DJ Tuffness, Wikkid splitz, Ruff man Dem and so on, are the kind of thing you read on a 16yr old’s school bag. In all these scenes, there seems to be a posturing aspiration to emulate the solely visceral, the immediate,lowest common denominator geeza “intellect” and little else ( if you discount perhaps, the “silly space jazz posturing” of some late 90’s d n b ) and this is reflected in dumb names like DJ Krust, DJ ruffbiz, DJ Gold Teet’ and so on.
My only point is that Dubstep is so very derivative, sounding like late 80’s EG/Eno Ambient music meets ( as you point out, accurately ) Disciples,with a dash of D n B vibrations.
I just wonder when something essentially new will morph out of the metropolises we all dwell in — or perhaps as children of the internet, ( sorry for the cliche,but don’t know how else to put it ) we are all covered by some kind of bland mass of availability and endless accessibility of everything to all, which renders everything on one — somehow flattened out — cynical,over wired level.
Not wishing to “bang on about the past” — but in the 60’s, a JB’s disc employed a groove you knew they had worked at for decades, tightened with sweat and discipline and energy and effort and concentration and hard times. An Upsetters disc had swamp grooves which evolved from years and years of slogging fused with sheer inspired random chance. An Eno disc featured crude samples he had literally collected from all over the world, and worked on for long periods with sweat and intellect and deep aspiration for the new.
Now — all of this is mass of influence,musical, historical, intellectual and far more — is available within minutes to anyone who can sample and patch together in minutes , with little or no musical/imaginative/disciplinary skill, and perhaps an inspiration with no concentration, discpiline or attention span whatsoever.
Also people , audiences seem to have little sense of “bullshit detector” anymore — In the 70’s, 80’s audiences more often than not, called a product shit if it was shit , or over derivative — now, discrimination between the new and the simply posturing and masquerading seems to have gone out the window.
Damn, I know this is going to look poncy and pretentious — but so what . I leave y’all with a pertinent quote from Prof. Don Cupitt, author and “philosopher.”
“(Trivialization in our existence is partially due to ) an end of realism, the end of a belief in absolutes, the end of belief that the world is ready made to be our home, with all the rules to be kept already laid down and built in. People are becoming de-traditionalised, nomadised, casualized, as the old fixed points of reference disappear — Instead of marriage a series of relationships, instead of a home, a series of addresses, instead of a career, freelancing, instead of belief, whatever one is currently “into” ,instead of stable identities , pluralism and flux; instead of society, the market and one’s own circle. Culture seems to have become all fringe and no mainstream. Popular (and essentially trivial) beliefs multiply exceedingly; but it’s all a fad. None of it is to be taken seriously, because it is not clear that anything is, or can be taken seriously anymore. There is a complete break with the past along with the rapid movement of capital, people and ideas around the world. There is a pervasive sense of groundlessness and outsidelessness. “Is that all there is? You mean this is it?” This loss is becoming so complete so quickly that very soon historians will find it very difficult to re-imagine what it was like to genuinely believe in something ( c/f “The Time of The Angels” Don Cupitt 2003 )
“In the old consciousness, identity was something metaphysical — now it increasingly has become simply a corporate ID — not a substance but a sign. Reality itself has become only an effect , something conjured up within and by the motion of signs. The line between drama and documentary,reality and fiction has become blurred.” ( “After God”, Introduction, ix )
“in modern, media led culture , we have in effect a return of the Middle Ages: it used to be the church that supplied everyone with an imaginary world in their head — now the media do that job,with celebrity as the new sainthood– in the all encompassing anonymity of the new global culture.”
“This change has ruptured Europe and America, but also other cultures — In the new high rise post modern cities of South and East Asia,the wipe out of tradition is breathtaking –without any obvious resistance or regret,and within a single lifetime — It is perhaps the most severe and sudden cultural rupture in the whole of human history.
The new global technological culture brings with it a very naturalistic cast of mind. The world is like a communications network. Everything is open,public,accessible and all on one level. Nothing is deep and nothing can be kept hidden for long. There is no secure privacy — the world of signs is a flowing , one level continuum with no one outside and no secret places.The presumption is that we can draw at least one clear line between the public and the private, between objectivity and subjectivity ,or between the dominant culture and the counterculture — But post modernity as a cultural condition has been constituted precisely by the erasure of these very distinctions. The public realm, the sea of meanings — is outsideless and and endless,nothing is fixed;everything moves and shifts together. It engulfs everything ,incuding values , private life,selfhood and the counterculture. There is no way of hiving off a little cluster of meanings ( absolutes, certainties, or fundamentals) and preserving them unchanged. On the contrary, –as the long history of religious esotericism demonstrates — meanings and truths kept unchallenged and out of the public view very quickly deteriorate into simple nonsense.”
“Eveything nowadays is beginning to float on a free global market — not only money and prices — but also linguistic meaning , religious truths and moral and aesthetic values.”
“In the new understanding of culture as a system of signs in motion ,the world of symbolic meaning in which we live is ¡¦an unanchored floating continuum. All reactions against it must use its vocabulary and are therefore part of it, and will be engulfed by it. You cant really drop out. There is nowhere to drop out to. Your protest against the system remains a part of the system.”
(INTRODUCTION vii — xv )
Chapter — “The Time of the Angels” ( 74–79) “(Nietzsche asserted that) once central authority broke down — he imagined Bacchanalian revel: with the end of realism, all free spirits run riot.”
I think it’s also worth pointing out that dubstep is a “scene” for good and bad, within every scene there will be people pushing in different directions, or indeed not pushing at all. So something more interesting my evolve OUT OF dubstep if it’s given time to incubate…
I don’t mind people slagging off dubstep – leaves more room at the dance – but “reggae and its related genres have created NOTHING new and worthy in the last ten years”? Do you really want to slag off modern reggae? Here? Do you really think Lady Saw, Tanya Stephens, South Rawkkas et al have done “NOTHING” in the last ten years?
Wash ya mouth out!
Well, we all have an opinion — I was expressing mine — and I am sure that some of the stuff I enjoy you’d call shite — I don’t have a problem with that.
You say, //””Do you really want to slag off modern reggae? Here? Do you really think Lady Saw, Tanya Stephens, South Rawkkas et al have done “NOTHING” in the last ten years?//
In my view, I hate their music. Can’t stand it, and I certainly don’t view the above artists as anything like a progression within reggae music. But hey, you like it. Fair enough.
I reiterate, all in my view and all — These are all just opinions people —
Not wishing to “bang on about the past” — but in the 60’s, a JB’s disc employed a groove you knew they had worked at for decades, tightened with sweat and discipline and energy and effort and concentration and hard times. An Upsetters disc had swamp grooves which evolved from years and years of slogging fused with sheer inspired random chance. An Eno disc featured crude samples he had literally collected from all over the world, and worked on for long periods with sweat and intellect and deep aspiration for the new.
Now — all of this mass of influence,musical, historical, intellectual and far more — is available within minutes to anyone who can sample and patch together in minutes , with little or no musical/imaginative/disciplinary skill, and perhaps with no concentration, discpiline,ideals of quality control or attention span whatsoever.
Also audiences seem to have little sense of “bullshit detector” anymore — In the 70’s, 80’s audiences more often than not, called a product shit if it was shit , or over derivative — now, discrimination between the new and the simply posturing and masquerading seems to have gone out the window.
sorry red eye – your long post above got caught in my spam trap and I just noticed it.
Yes, sorry John, I did go on there at far,far too great a length– sorry !
I like the book quote I whacked in there — but in this context it simply looks wanky and pretentious.
I apologize for it!
this post actually almost inspired me to write a long-winded blog post about the Burial thingy and dub-step
but, the more i lay in bed last night thinking about it, the more i realized that my attraction to dub-step is just all about the sheer sonics…is it anywhere near as good as dub-reggae or old skool d n b? newp…is it white student music? i dunno…im too far removed geographically from the whole scene to have a clue, really…many people have said that, and ill hafta take your word for it…but so what? at the end of the day, i like it because it sounds really amazing cranked up really loud, especially after smoking a fatty 🙂
great post, though, Red Eye…youve thought a lot more about it than i have, no doubt about it
still think the whole dubstep scene is just stripped down Trickyhop with a sidewinder of carrion-feeding DAT abusers and a nasty aversion to tunes… but (imagine Dick Emery) I like it…
Just got back from FWD>> and can say, hand on heart, that Dubstep is both All of and None of the above….:-)
sorry red eye but my bullshit detector is working fine and it’s parping loudly at your unsubstantiated comments. i’m not even a big supporter/player of dubstep in general, though there have been some cracking tunes, i actually possibly agree with some of your wild claims but you give absolutley no back-up to justify your long-winded rants and seem to delight in tearing down all sorts without actually stating anything non-damning.
i couldn’t give a toss about your background or ethinicity (or that of the people who make the record i enjoy and promote), only whether you have anything worthwhile to say and how well you put it – so your middle class student comments are just plain dumb and dredging up those sorts of tired old race/class lines colour everything else you write…in brown!
people in glasshouse shouldn’t throw stones about names…red eye (and thats hardly an original or clever handle is it now? whaddya do smoke a lot of weed/have an eye infection??)
furthermore on the name dubstep, who coined that and for that matter who is happy with it? does everyone who makes a record that might fall in this category have to take the blame for your moral outrage over something important as a subgenre name?? it was probably coined by a journalist, which is what it seems you wish you were.(don’t give up the day job)
you hate tanya stephens/south rakkas etc..you’re a fool to say that! any serious argument goes out the window when you are so proud of own half baked opinions and so dismissive of everyone elses. there are some points worthy of discussion in your red-eyed rant but you obscure them with all the sweeping statements and trashing.
nothing new or adventurous in reggae in the last 10 years i think assassin had the line for that sort of stupidity ‘idiot ting dat’ – you haven’t got a leg to stand on there.
red eye, you may have some points in there somewhere, but you burried em with the Golden Shovel of Bullshit.
I dont think we have “dubstep” here in tokyo. If we do its just called reggae.
Have to agree that while redeye makes a couple of pertinent points, it’s lost in lazy thinking and generalisations. All that guff about students etc.
Also, to accuse of dubstep of being unimaginative because of the song titles surely misses the point – surely it’s being ‘referential’, it’s acknowledging its influences, it’s harking back. That’s not the same as being derivative. There surely shouldn’t be a need to go through all the crap about post-modernism and referentiality and meta-this and that, but somebody calling a dubstep track “Killerstep” is clearly not a failure of the imagination – perhaps redeye instead has had a failure of humour?
Anyway, as Paul as already said, to write off decades worth of reggae – and steppers, dammit – invalidates the rest of the argument anyway.
I’m honest enough to admit that the dubstep I do really like probably appeals for the very fact that it does sound like an updating of a genre – digidub – that i really love but which had grown awfully stale. To hear the sounds and dynamics of the aforementioned Prowling Lion, Scud Missile, stuff like that given a fresh twist gives me a stiffie, and I don’t care who’s making it or who they’re making it for.
Also, a lot of the best dubstep sounds less like a merely updated digidub but like jungle slowed right down.
I reckon Wasteland were dubstep before anybody 🙂
Skream’s Dutch Flowerz is just like digidub and is fantastic.
Boxcutter’s Brood and Sunshine are nothing like digidub but are fantastic.
DMZ nights have a mix of races, genders and ages.
But keep going Red, we may not agree with you but you’ve got some good stuff to say.
Well whatever you say, if you just saw things in terms that humanity was infinate and not just vynil producers, you would see that the moment you were born until now wasn’t that long really and every new tune is another one for the ever growing palette. Ten years is not a long time and the rave scene is a bunch of mad inventors trying to build “the scene”. What you should all be doing is helping, but if your fed up with inventing new versions and upgrades of the same thing maybe take some acid.
calling dubstep the new heavy metal is a compliment, as far as im concerned. Dubstep like any genre of music has its good and bad. it has some innovators and some copycats.
some exploring roots and inspiration from clasics. and some exploring new technologies or crossroads with other genres. some dance music is about beatmatching and providing same sounding stuff that can be easily blended by djs. whatever.
burial had a few good cuts on the first album. would have been some nice illbient back in the day. if the whole dubstep genre came out in the mid 90s it would have blended well with Boston style Illbient.
Dubstep is not in any way whatsoever, a logical progression/sub genre/related fracture within dub/reggae/dancehall — In contrast, d n b and junglist certainly were a worthy step forward within the genre a decade or more back.
Why is dubstep a cul de sac of conservatism and musical/cerebral sludge?Because dubstep is middle class student music, and as far as new ideas go, is utterly redundant. Heavy, gut wrenchingly loud bass does not make a genre original. Nor does volume or trendy basement sessions. This is a simple case of form over content.The emperors new clothes. Dubstep is dirge music for introspective middle class dope smokers and students, with none of the innovation of the prvieoulsy mentioned genres. Even the name shows it’s backwardness : “Dub”, which is by now, an utterly tired, exhausted genre too , after 30 years or more in the public arena, and “Step”,arguably an abbreviation of the most well worn, dullest, stodgiest, most dull witted,most unimaginative sub genre within reggae — “steppers” — itself, much loved by white middle class students.Steppers is defined by the utterly unimaginative “dum dum dum” of the ( often computer soulless ) bass drum, and heavymetal style lyrics about apocalypse and retribution and cod spirituality and doom and gloom — Lots of lyrical “wooh yeahs” and “ooowwwws” , just as Judas Priest and Sabbath went in for.See people like the new roots lot for examples of this.
No — the emperor really is wearing no clothes.
Dubstep? Don’t belive the hype for a moment. This is the worst , most banal digi steppers, meets ambient, meets very slight edges of junglist and that tired old genre trip hop which no one dare mention any more it was so goddamn awful.
No — reggae and its related genres have created NOTHING new and worthy in the last ten years or so, when Junglist and d n b hardened into cliche and formula. Digi dub, one drops steppers, hard step — all irredeemabley awful bollocks and horse manure of the highest order. They are no more than the new heavy metal they are so so unadventurous.
PS Re-reading the above it sounds arrogant and dismissive — not supposed to. Just feel tired of so many genres masquerading as offering the startlingly new when basically all they are doing is re-inventing the wheel. Some dubstep sounds alright, sure, –but really, so much of it sounds little different to what Sly and Robbie were doing with their Taxi discomixes 20 years ago….to prove my point, check out dubstep tunes like “Hotstepping”,”Killerstep”, and “dubstep dreams”…. Damn, even the titles are derivative…..c’mon guys, just say it, the emperor really has no clothes on….
LOL – no punches pulled there, Mr Eye… I’m fairly cynical about dubstep myself but do like some of the records and it does sound good over a big system.
At its worst it sounds like derivative digidub circa 95 (Scud/Prowling Lion etc) with slightly different beats. In some ways that is a better sound than some of the current UK stuff anyway, so it keeps me happy. Maybe “newness” is overrated anyway?
Newness for the sake of it can easily lead down path of being experimental without being any good… I’m pretty happy with a pile of old records myself. Not quite sure what you’re into – but thanks for dropping by mate!
Yes, I agree it sounds good live — there is always something deep, something primal, effecting and essentially moving about a b line at extreme volume anyway.
You say, maybe newness is over rated? Well yes, I see your point, and in part I agree. But perhaps posturing as the new — as Dubstep does ( In my view at least ) is even worse.
I don’t essentially even dislike Dubstep really — Skream/loefah /Skuba stuff aint bad — they are alright i s’pose.
On a minor point tho, why do so many grime/d n b/junglist/garage/dubstep artists always choose such silly names? I thought loofah was something I found in a bathroom. Lots of the other names, Psyko, Intenz,Twista,Avenga, DJ Tuffness, Wikkid splitz, Ruff man Dem and so on, are the kind of thing you read on a 16yr old’s school bag. In all these scenes, there seems to be a posturing aspiration to emulate the solely visceral, the immediate,lowest common denominator geeza “intellect” and little else ( if you discount perhaps, the “silly space jazz posturing” of some late 90’s d n b ) and this is reflected in dumb names like DJ Krust, DJ ruffbiz, DJ Gold Teet’ and so on.
My only point is that Dubstep is so very derivative, sounding like late 80’s EG/Eno Ambient music meets ( as you point out, accurately ) Disciples,with a dash of D n B vibrations.
I just wonder when something essentially new will morph out of the metropolises we all dwell in — or perhaps as children of the internet, ( sorry for the cliche,but don’t know how else to put it ) we are all covered by some kind of bland mass of availability and endless accessibility of everything to all, which renders everything on one — somehow flattened out — cynical,over wired level.
Not wishing to “bang on about the past” — but in the 60’s, a JB’s disc employed a groove you knew they had worked at for decades, tightened with sweat and discipline and energy and effort and concentration and hard times. An Upsetters disc had swamp grooves which evolved from years and years of slogging fused with sheer inspired random chance. An Eno disc featured crude samples he had literally collected from all over the world, and worked on for long periods with sweat and intellect and deep aspiration for the new.
Now — all of this is mass of influence,musical, historical, intellectual and far more — is available within minutes to anyone who can sample and patch together in minutes , with little or no musical/imaginative/disciplinary skill, and perhaps an inspiration with no concentration, discpiline or attention span whatsoever.
Also people , audiences seem to have little sense of “bullshit detector” anymore — In the 70’s, 80’s audiences more often than not, called a product shit if it was shit , or over derivative — now, discrimination between the new and the simply posturing and masquerading seems to have gone out the window.
Damn, I know this is going to look poncy and pretentious — but so what . I leave y’all with a pertinent quote from Prof. Don Cupitt, author and “philosopher.”
“(Trivialization in our existence is partially due to ) an end of realism, the end of a belief in absolutes, the end of belief that the world is ready made to be our home, with all the rules to be kept already laid down and built in. People are becoming de-traditionalised, nomadised, casualized, as the old fixed points of reference disappear — Instead of marriage a series of relationships, instead of a home, a series of addresses, instead of a career, freelancing, instead of belief, whatever one is currently “into” ,instead of stable identities , pluralism and flux; instead of society, the market and one’s own circle. Culture seems to have become all fringe and no mainstream. Popular (and essentially trivial) beliefs multiply exceedingly; but it’s all a fad. None of it is to be taken seriously, because it is not clear that anything is, or can be taken seriously anymore. There is a complete break with the past along with the rapid movement of capital, people and ideas around the world. There is a pervasive sense of groundlessness and outsidelessness. “Is that all there is? You mean this is it?” This loss is becoming so complete so quickly that very soon historians will find it very difficult to re-imagine what it was like to genuinely believe in something ( c/f “The Time of The Angels” Don Cupitt 2003 )
“In the old consciousness, identity was something metaphysical — now it increasingly has become simply a corporate ID — not a substance but a sign. Reality itself has become only an effect , something conjured up within and by the motion of signs. The line between drama and documentary,reality and fiction has become blurred.” ( “After God”, Introduction, ix )
“in modern, media led culture , we have in effect a return of the Middle Ages: it used to be the church that supplied everyone with an imaginary world in their head — now the media do that job,with celebrity as the new sainthood– in the all encompassing anonymity of the new global culture.”
“This change has ruptured Europe and America, but also other cultures — In the new high rise post modern cities of South and East Asia,the wipe out of tradition is breathtaking –without any obvious resistance or regret,and within a single lifetime — It is perhaps the most severe and sudden cultural rupture in the whole of human history.
The new global technological culture brings with it a very naturalistic cast of mind. The world is like a communications network. Everything is open,public,accessible and all on one level. Nothing is deep and nothing can be kept hidden for long. There is no secure privacy — the world of signs is a flowing , one level continuum with no one outside and no secret places.The presumption is that we can draw at least one clear line between the public and the private, between objectivity and subjectivity ,or between the dominant culture and the counterculture — But post modernity as a cultural condition has been constituted precisely by the erasure of these very distinctions. The public realm, the sea of meanings — is outsideless and and endless,nothing is fixed;everything moves and shifts together. It engulfs everything ,incuding values , private life,selfhood and the counterculture. There is no way of hiving off a little cluster of meanings ( absolutes, certainties, or fundamentals) and preserving them unchanged. On the contrary, –as the long history of religious esotericism demonstrates — meanings and truths kept unchallenged and out of the public view very quickly deteriorate into simple nonsense.”
“Eveything nowadays is beginning to float on a free global market — not only money and prices — but also linguistic meaning , religious truths and moral and aesthetic values.”
“In the new understanding of culture as a system of signs in motion ,the world of symbolic meaning in which we live is ¡¦an unanchored floating continuum. All reactions against it must use its vocabulary and are therefore part of it, and will be engulfed by it. You cant really drop out. There is nowhere to drop out to. Your protest against the system remains a part of the system.”
(INTRODUCTION vii — xv )
Chapter — “The Time of the Angels” ( 74–79) “(Nietzsche asserted that) once central authority broke down — he imagined Bacchanalian revel: with the end of realism, all free spirits run riot.”
I think it’s also worth pointing out that dubstep is a “scene” for good and bad, within every scene there will be people pushing in different directions, or indeed not pushing at all. So something more interesting my evolve OUT OF dubstep if it’s given time to incubate…
I don’t mind people slagging off dubstep – leaves more room at the dance – but “reggae and its related genres have created NOTHING new and worthy in the last ten years”? Do you really want to slag off modern reggae? Here? Do you really think Lady Saw, Tanya Stephens, South Rawkkas et al have done “NOTHING” in the last ten years?
Wash ya mouth out!
Well, we all have an opinion — I was expressing mine — and I am sure that some of the stuff I enjoy you’d call shite — I don’t have a problem with that.
You say, //””Do you really want to slag off modern reggae? Here? Do you really think Lady Saw, Tanya Stephens, South Rawkkas et al have done “NOTHING” in the last ten years?//
In my view, I hate their music. Can’t stand it, and I certainly don’t view the above artists as anything like a progression within reggae music. But hey, you like it. Fair enough.
I reiterate, all in my view and all — These are all just opinions people —
Not wishing to “bang on about the past” — but in the 60’s, a JB’s disc employed a groove you knew they had worked at for decades, tightened with sweat and discipline and energy and effort and concentration and hard times. An Upsetters disc had swamp grooves which evolved from years and years of slogging fused with sheer inspired random chance. An Eno disc featured crude samples he had literally collected from all over the world, and worked on for long periods with sweat and intellect and deep aspiration for the new.
Now — all of this mass of influence,musical, historical, intellectual and far more — is available within minutes to anyone who can sample and patch together in minutes , with little or no musical/imaginative/disciplinary skill, and perhaps with no concentration, discpiline,ideals of quality control or attention span whatsoever.
Also audiences seem to have little sense of “bullshit detector” anymore — In the 70’s, 80’s audiences more often than not, called a product shit if it was shit , or over derivative — now, discrimination between the new and the simply posturing and masquerading seems to have gone out the window.
sorry red eye – your long post above got caught in my spam trap and I just noticed it.
Yes, sorry John, I did go on there at far,far too great a length– sorry !
I like the book quote I whacked in there — but in this context it simply looks wanky and pretentious.
I apologize for it!
this post actually almost inspired me to write a long-winded blog post about the Burial thingy and dub-step
but, the more i lay in bed last night thinking about it, the more i realized that my attraction to dub-step is just all about the sheer sonics…is it anywhere near as good as dub-reggae or old skool d n b? newp…is it white student music? i dunno…im too far removed geographically from the whole scene to have a clue, really…many people have said that, and ill hafta take your word for it…but so what? at the end of the day, i like it because it sounds really amazing cranked up really loud, especially after smoking a fatty 🙂
great post, though, Red Eye…youve thought a lot more about it than i have, no doubt about it
still think the whole dubstep scene is just stripped down Trickyhop with a sidewinder of carrion-feeding DAT abusers and a nasty aversion to tunes… but (imagine Dick Emery) I like it…
Just got back from FWD>> and can say, hand on heart, that Dubstep is both All of and None of the above….:-)
sorry red eye but my bullshit detector is working fine and it’s parping loudly at your unsubstantiated comments. i’m not even a big supporter/player of dubstep in general, though there have been some cracking tunes, i actually possibly agree with some of your wild claims but you give absolutley no back-up to justify your long-winded rants and seem to delight in tearing down all sorts without actually stating anything non-damning.
i couldn’t give a toss about your background or ethinicity (or that of the people who make the record i enjoy and promote), only whether you have anything worthwhile to say and how well you put it – so your middle class student comments are just plain dumb and dredging up those sorts of tired old race/class lines colour everything else you write…in brown!
people in glasshouse shouldn’t throw stones about names…red eye (and thats hardly an original or clever handle is it now? whaddya do smoke a lot of weed/have an eye infection??)
furthermore on the name dubstep, who coined that and for that matter who is happy with it? does everyone who makes a record that might fall in this category have to take the blame for your moral outrage over something important as a subgenre name?? it was probably coined by a journalist, which is what it seems you wish you were.(don’t give up the day job)
you hate tanya stephens/south rakkas etc..you’re a fool to say that! any serious argument goes out the window when you are so proud of own half baked opinions and so dismissive of everyone elses. there are some points worthy of discussion in your red-eyed rant but you obscure them with all the sweeping statements and trashing.
nothing new or adventurous in reggae in the last 10 years i think assassin had the line for that sort of stupidity ‘idiot ting dat’ – you haven’t got a leg to stand on there.
red eye, you may have some points in there somewhere, but you burried em with the Golden Shovel of Bullshit.
I dont think we have “dubstep” here in tokyo. If we do its just called reggae.
Have to agree that while redeye makes a couple of pertinent points, it’s lost in lazy thinking and generalisations. All that guff about students etc.
Also, to accuse of dubstep of being unimaginative because of the song titles surely misses the point – surely it’s being ‘referential’, it’s acknowledging its influences, it’s harking back. That’s not the same as being derivative. There surely shouldn’t be a need to go through all the crap about post-modernism and referentiality and meta-this and that, but somebody calling a dubstep track “Killerstep” is clearly not a failure of the imagination – perhaps redeye instead has had a failure of humour?
Anyway, as Paul as already said, to write off decades worth of reggae – and steppers, dammit – invalidates the rest of the argument anyway.
I’m honest enough to admit that the dubstep I do really like probably appeals for the very fact that it does sound like an updating of a genre – digidub – that i really love but which had grown awfully stale. To hear the sounds and dynamics of the aforementioned Prowling Lion, Scud Missile, stuff like that given a fresh twist gives me a stiffie, and I don’t care who’s making it or who they’re making it for.
Also, a lot of the best dubstep sounds less like a merely updated digidub but like jungle slowed right down.
I reckon Wasteland were dubstep before anybody 🙂
Skream’s Dutch Flowerz is just like digidub and is fantastic.
Boxcutter’s Brood and Sunshine are nothing like digidub but are fantastic.
DMZ nights have a mix of races, genders and ages.
But keep going Red, we may not agree with you but you’ve got some good stuff to say.
Well whatever you say, if you just saw things in terms that humanity was infinate and not just vynil producers, you would see that the moment you were born until now wasn’t that long really and every new tune is another one for the ever growing palette. Ten years is not a long time and the rave scene is a bunch of mad inventors trying to build “the scene”. What you should all be doing is helping, but if your fed up with inventing new versions and upgrades of the same thing maybe take some acid.
calling dubstep the new heavy metal is a compliment, as far as im concerned. Dubstep like any genre of music has its good and bad. it has some innovators and some copycats.
some exploring roots and inspiration from clasics. and some exploring new technologies or crossroads with other genres. some dance music is about beatmatching and providing same sounding stuff that can be easily blended by djs. whatever.
burial had a few good cuts on the first album. would have been some nice illbient back in the day. if the whole dubstep genre came out in the mid 90s it would have blended well with Boston style Illbient.